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Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, OtherSun, 02 Aug 2015 16:50:32 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.2The Last Book I Loved: Dear Lil Waynehttp://therumpus.net/2015/03/the-last-book-i-loved-dear-lil-wayne/
http://therumpus.net/2015/03/the-last-book-i-loved-dear-lil-wayne/#commentsThu, 12 Mar 2015 07:01:31 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=136132When I was 16, I got my first job as a barista. When I was 17 and I went away to school, I got my second job as a barista. When I was 18 and I went to Texas alone for the summer, I got my third job as a barista. And so on. When I was 21, I graduated from an Ivy League university (it’s not important that it’s Ivy League, except to show how entitled to more rewarding work I felt/feel) and got my sixth job as a barista.

But now I’m not in school, so I have buckets of free time—time that I use to drive my boyfriend to play rehearsals and to set up Chromecast. Time that I used to read Nick Hornby’s Ten Years in the Tub, put every book that he talked about into my Amazon shopping cart, realize that I can’t afford any of them, and then watch Mystic River on my newly set-up Chromecast. Time that I use to pick up the newspaper that I once helped edit and then scribble corrections all over it for the benefit of basically no one. The point is I have a lot of time to write, and I don’t do it. (I also have a lot of time to scroll through Tumblr, and I definitely do that.)

Last night I stumbled upon a series of photocopied pages from a collection of poems called Dear Lil Wayne. Apparently, during the eight months he was sentenced to Rikers Island, a poet named Lauren Ireland wrote postcards to the rapper. The rapper never responded, but the writer compiled them into a tiny purple book. The missives are short, impassioned and eccentric—they lack a narrative arc that would betray the project as being contrived. Instead, they seem like genuine snapshots from the daily life of an artist who has trouble acknowledging herself as such.

Ireland does a lot of things in Dear Lil Wayne—she sweats tequila and cuts her bangs and wonders about fear boners and states that she would like to be dazzling. She makes almost no reference to her writing except to say, “Someone told me that I don’t look like a poet and I thought, well good.”

In her first letter, Ireland tells Lil Wayne, “Almost everyone is lonely. Almost no one’s amazing.” It’s unclear whether she’s calling him one of the exceptional “amazing” people or if she’s implying that they both are. But that’s the intrigue of the collection—how close can one really feel to a celebrity? What purpose does that serve? Ireland doesn’t seem totally satisfied with the one-sided conversation but she doesn’t seem infuriated by it either, which implies that there is something to be gained from the unrequited love of a celebrity. But what?

The original celebrity was, of course, Hercules (of course?): The Greek word “hero” refers not to a living person acting out courageous and noble deeds, but rather to a dead man who is venerated and worshipped at a specific tomb or shrine. The hero’s spectacular life is believed to afford him nearly god-like powers to influence the lives of his worshippers—most historians, in fact, admit to the distinction between heroes and gods as a particularly complicated and nebulous one. A hero, writes Robert Parker in his 1988 book On Greek Religion, “retained the limited and partisan interests of his mortal life. He would help those who lived in the vicinity of his tomb, or who belonged to the tribe of which he himself was the founder.”

Incidentally, my “original celebrity” was E.B. White, and he is actually dead, so I guess I chose better than Ireland. I fell in love with him when I first learned to read and have wanted to name my daughter Charlotte ever since I could conceive of having a daughter rather than just being one. This summer I worked at the type of hip literary magazine where they think it’s appropriate not to pay their interns or to invite them to any of the industry events that the Paris Review interns get to go to. Our main responsibility was research—reading dozens of books of letters written by famous authors and then mining the New York Public Library system for all available information on the precise context of each one. I mention this to point out that every single one of E.B. White’s letters to every single one of his friends was about the antics of his geese. He was the least pretentious and most important contributor to the New Yorker during the half-century that the New Yorker was an important contributor to the nation’s literary conversation. I’m planning to drive to his farmhouse in Maine as soon as I make enough money selling coffee to people. I guess I’ll pour one out in his barnyard or something.

“I hope we meet each other in one of many hells,” Ireland writes. “I’ll be there waiting for you and we’ll be okay together.” Because tombs were the site of hero worship, the focus of hero cults was not on the heavens but the subterranean, the underworld. The cults that rose up around Greek heroes were called chthonic cults, and chthonic, a word that is impossible to pronounce and nearly impossible to precisely define, means something close to “within the earth,” or, more stupidly, “the interior of the soil.”

Ireland, in her entreaties to the less-traditionally enshrined Lil Wayne, makes frequent, reluctant reference to the fact that she is just a white girl living in Brooklyn—that she doesn’t quite fall under the artist’s protection. This seems to fuel her insistence that he love and save her. In one of the first letters to the rapper, Ireland asks, “Are you listening? Okay listen. There are so many things I have to tell you.” We all know that the talking method only works because we imagine an audience validating us. I guess there’s no way to prove that Ireland is deliberately raising up a cult around a musical artist, but there’s also no way to prove that someone who would dedicate a book to a person they’d never met is not doing that.

The collection’s appeal, I think, comes from this idea of audience and artist—who is the true audience of a collection of postcards that received no response from the addressed? Who is the audience of Ireland’s poetry, and of Lil Wayne’s? Did he expect or even intend that she would be part of his audience? Ireland recounts a time that she read a collection of her poetry to her friends and “They were quiet. There was thunder and lightning. Someone spilled a beer. What does it feel like when no one responds, except to make a face like I can’t believe I just spilled that beer.” Though it’s no fun to call a book specific to a time or place, this one does feel specific to a time in which the definition of “audience” is confused. I found this book on Tumblr, not in a book store. I found a woman’s letters to a man on Tumblr, not in his pocket.

Regardless, Ireland’s insistence that she belongs to Lil Wayne’s dominion seems based on her yearning to call herself a poet and an artist. She calls on him as if he is someone who could sponsor her as such. “I want to write like you do, right in the very burning air,” she writes. “Please, I want to be you when I grow up.” There is nothing so almighty powerful as starting a sentence with the word “please.”

Nearly every one of the letters contains a question, or several questions, intensely posed and far from hypothetical. The questions come across as a forceful reassertion that this project is a correspondence, despite the fact that the questions are never answered. Ireland makes response feel like a matter of life and death. Her desperation is so keenly felt that the reader is compelled to forget that Lil Wayne is the one who is sitting in a prison cell and worry exclusively about the voice who pleads with him.

In moments of defeat Ireland lashes out plaintively, with prayers to a god who is unable or unwilling to empathize with mortal beings: “You wouldn’t understand, but it’s hard to be boring in a fascinating world.” Regardless of whether the reader has ever struggled with naming themselves an artist, Ireland’s collection holds something for anyone who has ever felt alone even while in love, who has ever felt sad leaving a place they hate, who has ever experienced an inexplicable attachment to something that feels bigger and better than themselves and who has ever really really wished that they had someone to write to.

Says Nieto on why she started the site: “My literary mothers, the writers whose work I devoured late at night — cigarette in hand, propped against the flaking metal rails of the fire escape, my own mother exhausted from a day of work in the next room — were invaluable to me.”

Related Posts:

]]>Catching up with Mother’s Day weekend, BuzzFeed Books looks at Nadxieli Nieto’s newly launched Literary Mothers tumblr featuring short essays by women writers on the authors that have inspired them.

Says Nieto on why she started the site: “My literary mothers, the writers whose work I devoured late at night — cigarette in hand, propped against the flaking metal rails of the fire escape, my own mother exhausted from a day of work in the next room — were invaluable to me.”

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/05/literary-mothers/feed/0Announcing the Rumblr Book Club!http://therumpus.net/2014/05/announcing-the-rumblr-book-club/
http://therumpus.net/2014/05/announcing-the-rumblr-book-club/#commentsWed, 07 May 2014 18:00:14 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=126096The Rumblr is combining two of the best things on the Internet: The Rumpus Book Club and Tumblr. So, for those of you who (unimaginably) have yet to subscribe to the official club, you can get your feet wet with us on your dashboard.]]>The Rumblr is combining two of the best things on the Internet: The Rumpus Book Club and Tumblr. So, for those of you who (unimaginably) have yet to subscribe to the official club, you can get your feet wet with us on your dashboard. We’ll be discussing a previous Rumpus Book Club pick—An Untamed State by our own beloved Essays Editor, Roxane Gay—over the next several weeks.

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/01/cats-havent-changed-much-since-the-1400s/feed/0“Lol My Thesis” Illuminates Academic Achievementhttp://therumpus.net/2014/01/lol-my-thesis-illuminates-academic-achievement/
http://therumpus.net/2014/01/lol-my-thesis-illuminates-academic-achievement/#commentsThu, 02 Jan 2014 19:00:24 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=122293If you had to sum up your undergraduate thesis in one sentence, what would you say?

Recent examples include “Italian has 23 mutually unintelligible dialects, not including hand gestures” (Romance linguistics, University of Washington), “Computers will do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do” (mechanical engineering, Yale), and “Crack was indeed whack” (history, Columbia University).

]]>If you had to sum up your undergraduate thesis in one sentence, what would you say?

Recent examples include “Italian has 23 mutually unintelligible dialects, not including hand gestures” (Romance linguistics, University of Washington), “Computers will do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do” (mechanical engineering, Yale), and “Crack was indeed whack” (history, Columbia University).

Sagittarius: This is a week for feeling a little bit fragile, a little small, a little nervous, a little weird. It’s a week for feeling lost and that’s okay, good even. Call your friends and tell them about it. Listen to songs about being very young.

The call came while I was putting on my makeup at the kitchen table. I watched my husband’s face drain of blood. I heard him say “Are you serious?” in a tone I’d never heard before, can’t articulate, and hope never to hear again. He hung up the phone. He told me to sit down.

That day passed in a haze of shock, vomiting and Ativan. Thank god for the Ativan.

Some time later that night, numb, medicated, breathing shallowly, unable to eat or keep down food, I sat down and created a WordPress site. The first post that I wrote included the following text:

My name is Nikki Reimer. I was an only child for six years.

—

My beautiful, talented, sweet, smart, amazing, lovely, handsome, wonderful brother died in his sleep at the age of 26.

This is for him.

I used a quotation from the book The Outsiders as the site tag line: Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold. I chose the quotation not remembering that the band that had hired Chris as their touring guitarist throughout 2011, The Dodos, had taken to calling him “Pony.” I then uploaded six photos of Chris taken in 2010, drank enough vodka to become completely anesthetized, and went to bed.

I’m not sure what drew me to the Internet. Shock is a protective mechanism; it keeps the mind from having to process too much all at once. I stayed in shock for a long time, and while I was there I spewed my emotions all over Facebook and Twitter, neither thinking nor caring about the effects my emotional vomit might have on readers, friends, and strangers.

Most responses to my online grieving were supportive and compassionate. A community of friends and artists held me up through their words, their books, songs, poems, cookies, candles and collages mailed from all across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. I met and grew close to people who had also lost people suddenly and tragically, or who had also lost siblings early in their lives.

One poet wrote her condolences to me on Facebook, and added, “If it was one of my siblings, I don’t think I would ever stop screaming.”

I thought of her comment many times over the first twelve months, because I never did stop screaming.

Every day over that first year, I screamed. I wailed, sobbed, and tore out my hair. Chris’ girlfriend and I both started Tumblr grief blogs into which we still pour our pain every hour, every day, every week. I picked Twitter fights with strangers. Considered suicide. Committed Facebook suicide.

After one such public flame-out—I’d renamed myself “Bag of Dicks Reimer” on Facebook and changed my profile picture to an unknown woman ugly-crying—my husband, compassionate but firm, suggested that I was spending all my time inside the internet because I was trying to find my brother. That it was time to put down the iPhone.

He had a point.

However, I kept searching, I kept screaming, and I kept writing. Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project. I wrote prose poems for Chris, then collaged images, then sound pieces. And then I created an interactive website hosting a series of multimedia pieces that combine my work and his: Let’s Improvise a Bone Graft.

I posted from Vancouver, where I pined for my brother and the life we shared in Calgary. I posted while my husband and I packed up our apartment and loaded the U-Haul. I posted when we stopped in Kelowna, where I let some of my brother’s ashes go into the warm waters of Lake Okanagan, on the beach where we had played as children. I posted when we arrived in Calgary, while I sorted through boxes of childhood mementos. My first haircut. His first dance recital. A paper Valentine he made me when he was four.

Rifling through Chris’ bookshelf one day, I pick up a tattered copy of Ulysses I’d lent him. Out falls a postcard I’d sent him several years back: Robert Johnson with a hand on his guitar and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Moments like these feel like intratextual, metaphysical messages from beyond. I photograph my hand holding the book with the postcard inside, and it becomes part of Bone Graft. It also inspires another part of the project: a listing of some of the many musicians who died before the age of thirty. Their names and ages scroll up the screen over writing from Chris’ notebooks and a sound piece by me. It’s layer upon layer of memory and loss and object and rage and grief and love.

Now Chris can no longer be found physically anywhere, it is true.

His remains are shards of bone and ash in small memorial urns taken by his closest friends, and a larger urn that is heartbreakingly equal to the size and weight of a newborn baby, the size and weight he was when we brought him home from the hospital in 1986.

But another part of Chris, a part that is closer to his soul, continues to live, online, in the music that he wrote and played, in pictures and videos and interviews, in cached pages of the initial shocked responses to his death.

This online afterlife is somewhat ironic. Chris was deeply ambivalent about the internets, and self-promotion in general. He’d talked his best friend Marc into quitting Facebook several years ago. In the last months before he died, he’d mentioned to me that he was considering joining Zuckerberg’s empire in order to keep in touch with people he’d met on tour, but he never did.

This gives me pause, when I think of how public I have made my grief.

After he died, a small part of the internet briefly lit up with the news of his death. I would type his name into Google (piningly, searchingly), and the suggested search terms, in order, would be: “christopher reimer cause of death,” “christopher reimer women,” “christopher reimer death,” “christopher reimer pitchfork.” I screen-capped this search because it was so heart-stabbingly horrible; because it magnified the horror of the situation to me; because Chris had a minor indie-music level of notoriety, so of course when he died people would be curious, but also fuck you it’s none of your business; because I could hear Chris’ voice in my head, and the particular inflection his voice would take when he would say of something horrible, “That’s horrible.” And that’s what I heard, when I looked at these algorithmic search term suggestions: “That’s horrible.” The image is now a part of the Bone Graft project, assembled together with lines from Roman poet Catallus’ elegiac dead brother poems.

I loved my brother with a fierceness that is not ashamed to stand howling and naked in the middle of the road, and what I miss is the material essence of him. The only thing in the world that I want, and can’t have, is my brother’s arms around my shoulders, his infectious laugh, his shit-eating grin, his middle finger pointed at me in response to sisterly teasing. His “jerkface!” in response to my “jackass!”

Instead, I am left with the objects and the digital artifacts that Chris left behind: half-soldered effects pedals and lead dust all over his bedroom. Unreleased ambient tracks on his computer. Pictures from tours. Funny drawings. Scraps of writing.

Chris and I always communicated through gifts and offerings of art passed back and forth. When we were children, he would co-star in all my overbearing older sister plays, his timing and ability to memorize his lines always perfect. When we were teens, we played a sort of word association game, building these post-modern tone poems: “Perspicacity.” “Perestroika.” “Muffin top.” “Piston engine.” We would never talk about things like this, we would just start them up spontaneously, riffing off each other’s energy.

After I moved away to Vancouver, I would send him books I thought he should read. He would gift back such creations as a mix CD with a hand-sewn brown kraft cover screen-printed with a collage of a map and our great-grandfather’s face, or a set of stickers made from his abstract sea creature drawings. When I moved out, I’d abandoned our Baba’s high school t-shirt, a white 1940s cotton short-sleeved tee with red ribbing at the sleeves and collar, and an insignia that said “Saskatoon Tech” over the breast. Chris took to wearing the shirt, which made me remember that it was awesome, so I wanted it back, and he’d always say, “nope.” So smug, eyes twinkling. “Nope.” Years after I stopped asking about that shirt, it turned up in my Christmas present.

The kid always had perfect timing.

After he died I leafed through the notebooks in his room and found a series of poems. My musician brother was writing. I was heartbroken all over again to find this because I’d never known that he was writing. Maybe he didn’t think he’d written anything good enough to show me, or good enough to show me yet, but these and other snippets of prose and poetry that he wrote have a spark of unpolished brilliance to them. And since it’s too late to tell him this, I’ve folded his prose fragments into the Bone Graft project, collaged against my textual or audio responses.

My project is extended, circular and labyrinthine. It is an electronic elegy that I do not believe could be a book, because a book is too linear. I need it to resist closure. Death is final, sure, fine, but in grief there is no such thing as closure. There is ebb and flow of emotion, and there is learning to live with the gaping wound, but there is no close. The acute distress does ease with time, and you might emerge stronger from having lived through the loss, but that doesn’t mean you are ever ok with it. A cousin asked me if I had closure the day we had my brother cremated, and I almost punched him in the face. I might still punch him in the face, if the mood strikes.

I live within a morphing, evolving digital grief, and so I am writing a morphing, evolving digital lament. I am seeking out possibilities for circuitous routing. I am searching for electrical feedback. I continue creating in order to continue living with the absence.

Though my brother is dead, I continue to follow the pictures he posts. I continue to respond to his text messages. And I hope against reason that wherever he is now, something I’ve created might slip like a postcard out of the pages, into his lap.

]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/05/improvising-a-bone-graft/feed/8The Ghost of Mary MacLanehttp://therumpus.net/2013/03/the-ghost-of-mary-maclane/
http://therumpus.net/2013/03/the-ghost-of-mary-maclane/#commentsTue, 12 Mar 2013 18:36:59 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=111975An average American newspaper-reader in the first decade of the last century immediately understood, if he read that something was “of the Mary MacLane type,” that this name was shorthand for outsized self-absorption of a specifically feminine nature.]]>Mary MacLane was born in 1881 and died in 1929, and in the intervening years wrote three books, beginning in her late teens with The Story of Mary MacLane (republished by Melville House under MacLane’s intended title, I Await the Devil’s Coming). That book sold more than a hundred thousand copies, inciting scandal and inspiring parodies “by the ream.” An average American newspaper-reader in the first decade of the last century immediately understood, if he read that something was “of the Mary MacLane type,” that this name was shorthand for outsized self-absorption of a specifically feminine nature.

Unfortunately for MacLane, her subsequent books did not seize the public imagination in the same way as her initial effort had, though her skill and talent had evolved considerably by the time she published I, Mary MacLane in 1917. Reviewers mocked her for being frivolous, boring, and myopically self-obsessed. She became ill and possibly alcoholic. When she died, broke and alone in a Chicago hotel, her New York Times obituary’s first sentence described her as a “writer of sex stories.”

Over the course of the past century MacLane’s oeuvre has occasionally been reevaluated and she has been minorly republished and anthologized; she has been claimed as a pioneering feminist, notable bisexual and even as a prominent Canadian (she was born in Manitoba). Butte, Montana, where I, Mary MacLane was written and which Mary MacLane reviled for its provincial conservatism, now celebrates her as a famous daughter. But for the most part she is forgotten, and her books are no longer read.

This might be in part because these diaries are not particularly inviting to readers, at least not initially. MacLane’s defiant, exclusive celebration of herself can seem to obviate the need for anyone else’s interest. After a few pages of declarative sentences that all begin with “I,” it’s tempting to put the book down. But readers who resist that temptation will be rewarded. If you are patient and indulge her for a few pages of “I am a genius,” you will be treated to a glimpse of the Mary MacLane who deserves canonization alongside Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein as an early illuminator of precisely what it was like to be conscious, moment to moment, in a time when personal and honest revelations of women’s subjectivity were not simply shunned (as they are now) but actively, violently discouraged. As I, Mary MacLane progresses, what seems at first like overweening egotism—in part because MacLane describes it, proudly, as such—comes to seem not only understandable but justified.

MacLane had interesting thoughts and the ability to describe and record them, and the temerity to imagine that other people might be interested in them, too. This temerity verged, of necessity, on insanity. Writing at a time when women were supposed to be silent and virtuous, MacLane had to be at least a little bit crazy in order to be able to create anything at all.

Via her diary entries, which are all headlined “tomorrow” in a nod to Macbeth’s soliloquy about the “petty pace” of repetitive, painful days, a portrait of MacLane gradually emerges. Her initial fame, she writes, allowed her to escape her provincial Midwestern hometown and spend her twenties living in Boston and Greenwich Village, with summers in Florida and trips to Europe. While living in New York, she wrote newspaper dispatches of her experience of the city that are some of her best work; these incidental pieces hint at what she might have been capable of writing if she had been encouraged to explore her descriptive powers in a less exclusively self-directed way. But at twenty-seven she caught scarlet fever and had to spend the next two years recuperating, and this is the Mary MacLane we meet in this book. Being ill was “the most crucial bodily adventure she had known,” and she emerged from her sickbed a changed woman, mentally and physically. I, Mary MacLane is a memoir of convalescence by someone who has new cause to record and decode every detail of her material and emotional life.

The tragedy of Mary MacLane’s life was twofold, and its first tragedy is fairly obvious: she was writing at a time when the deep misogyny of American culture had only begun to be exposed and dismantled enough for her to exist, and the patriarchy was not nearly subverted enough yet for women like her to prosper and thrive. But the second tragedy of her life was that the medium she was born to write in had not yet been invented. MacLane’s public diary entries, with their succinct, crystalline descriptions of quotidian events, would have made her an instant star on the Internet, if the Internet had existed in 1902. She was a blogger avant la lettre, to an extent that is almost eerie.

Her concern with the quotidian is what makes her writing so well suited to, say, a Tumblr. She describes her outfits and her meals, her aimless walks and her reading habits, the quality of her shoes, and in doing so she creates the impression of being imprisoned, somewhat, not just in Butte but inside her own mind. She writes of having an overwhelming impression, which she can’t confirm, that there might be women all over the country and perhaps all over the world who are as fervid-minded and as bored as she is, and she wishes she had a way of connecting with them:

While I sit here in this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legionwomen of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs—in Wichita-Kansas and SouthBend-Indiana and Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-NewYork and Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and BowlingGreen-Kentucky; each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of little vapidish crosspurpose: each waiting, waiting always—waiting all her life not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive and nurturing—and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin bright blade stuck deep in her breast; each more or less roundly hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.

The poignancy of this passage has to do with its deep familiarity—versions of it are being written on WordPress and Tumblr and even as Facebook status updates, every day. But it is also poignant because we know that MacLane was not alone; there were women just like her, sitting full of thoughts and feelings that had no outlet. Now at least modern-day MacLanes can easily confirm their suspicions that women like them exist.

***

It’s impossible to overstate how much reviewers hated MacLane and how deeply they held her in contempt, citing her “vulgarity” and calling her book “a revelation of self which is not interesting or sympathetic.” Their insistence on calling her “boring” quickly begins to seem absurd: if she was so boring, why were they so obsessed? Critics also insisted that she was doing the world a disservice by getting attention that they (disingenuously) declared ought to be granted to presumably worthier writers: “Think of the hundreds of poor lonesome girls working away at the making of literature who cannot get their literature printed and published.” When asked to explain MacLane’s popularity, they mostly just threw up their hands in befuddlement: “People go wild over young girls writing slush about themselves,” the author of a MacLane parody “explained” in 1902.

Reading these reviews and parodies provokes the same sense of familiarity as MacLane’s writing does; I’ve read these criticisms before, many times, in reviews of books that were published much more recently. I read a review like this of Sheila Heti’s novel How Should A Person Be?. Just last week I read a review like this of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. And of course, my own first book, a collection of autobiographical essays, received a similar critical reception: I was taking up space worthier writers should be filling, my concerns were trivial, I was not interesting. Several reviewers expressed faux concern at the way I had “exploited” myself by writing about sex and implied that I had “invaded the privacy” of men by writing about my relationships with them.

I had to spend some time wondering about whether I had done either of these things. Luckily I discovered MacLane soon after my book’s publication, and around the same time I read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus.

In that autobiographical novel, which concerns Kraus’s crumbling marriage to literary theorist Sylvere Lotringer and her affair with art critic Richard Hebidge, Kraus anticipates this kind of criticism and addresses it directly. “Why,” she wonders, “does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement?”

Kraus’s revolutionary reimagining of privacy—her calling into question of whom it is, exactly, that “privacy” is intended to protect—saved me from believing that I had erred somehow by attempting to describe the reality of my own life, rather than transmuting it into “fiction” and thereby, at least theoretically, protecting myself and the people I wrote about from “exposure.” Writing about Kraus’s book, critic Elizabeth Gumport explains that:

What the pretense of privacy often does is protect us from reality. It is called on to conceal the fact that there are two realities: the world as it is lived in by men, and the world of women, which has historically been exiled from political and philosophical consideration. It has been regarded as beneath such consideration, its truths narrowly and inescapably personal—rather than universal—and therefore inevitably trivial.

“I must express myself or lose myself or break,” Mary MacLane wrote.

***

Before she faded into obscurity, MacLane wrote, directed and starred in a short silent film, released in 1917, called Men Who Have Made Love to Me, which detailed with humor and great detail the different types of men she had encountered; no known copy of this film exists. It is believed to be the first film in which an actor directly addresses the camera and also the first whose director also starred in it. In 2010, my friend the playwright Normandy Sherwood recreated this film, using MacLane’s original script, as part of a play she wrote about MacLane. When I went to see it the audience laughed a lot at how seriously Mary (played by the hugely talented Juliana Francis-Kelly) took herself, but Francis-Kelly portrayed her so sincerely that she seemed to come alive.

After the show, after Francis-Kelly had come out for her curtain call and was walking around greeting friends still in costume, I had the bizarre impulse to go up to her and throw my arms around her, as I would if she’d really been Mary. I wanted to tell her that eventually she would be recognized. Mary, I wanted to say, you will be known as an early practitioner of an art-form that’s only now beginning to come into its own; women are finally making mainstream works of art that are not only valued as provocation but taken seriously as cultural forces. 1917 was too early; so, in some ways, was 2010. But I have high hopes for 2013, and beyond.

I didn’t do this, of course. But I’m saying it now, and if Mary MacLane’s hungry ghost can hear me, I hope she will be a little bit satisfied.

***

This excerpt is drawn from the introduction toI, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane, to be published by Melville House on March 19.